Click the “Start” button to start the service (sometimes this will automatically put the radio button at “Start and Stop manually”)

Select either “Start and stop manually” or “Start and stop with host” depending how secure you want to have your setup.

Click the “OK” button to close the “Options” dialogThere is a “Services” section on the left, with a “Properties…” hyperlink on the right: click that “Properties…” hyperlink

Check if the 3 services are now indeed running

Click the “OK” button to close the “Services Properties” dialog

Name your networks before doing anything else

Lesson learned from previous ESXi installations with many vSwitches: name your Virtual Switches, Virtual Machine Port Groups and VMKernel Ports as soon as possible. If you rename them later, then you run into trouble, because the rename operations are not propagated across other configurations. For instance if you have a NIC of a VM use a certain named VM Port Group called “VM Network”, and then you rename that “VM Network Fiber” , the VM will eventually disconnect that NIC (because the old “VM Network” does not exist any more, so it cannot find the port group, nor the switch around it).

Management Network versus VMKernel

When configuring multiple vSwitches, the first one (normally called vSwitch0) has a Virtual Machine Port Group called “VM Network” (on which the VMs communicatie) and a VMKernel Port called “Management Network”. The latter – even if you rename it – is the “Management Network” on the ESXi console (you reset it if you want to get a new DHCP address, see below). Even if you later add a new Virtual Switch with a new VMKernel, then the first one is still bound to the console “Management Network”: the one mentioned in VMware KB: Configuring the ESXi Management Network from the direct console.

Copy the VIB somewhere on your server. There are various ways, either using an SSH client on your favourite platform like scp, or WinSCP or Putty, or just the vSphere Client, then copy it to your data store. It can be copied anywhere, I just copied it to “/tmp/LSI-MegaRAID-9260-8i/vmware-esx-provider-lsiprovider.vib”

Shutdown or Suspend all your running VMs For instance by entering this from the ESX CLI:

Wait for a while (it can take a couple of minutes on slow systems) until you see output like this:Installation Result
Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required: true
VIBs Installed: LSI_bootbank_lsiprovider_500.04.V0.34-0012
VIBs Removed:
VIBs Skipped:

If it fails, then retry the command like this by adding the “–no-sig-check“:

Find the “Virtual Switch” where the GREEN NIC of your Endian connects to

Click on the “Properties” link for that Virtual Switch

Select the “Virtual Machine Port Group”

Click “Edit”

Go to the “Security” tab

Put a checkmark after the “Promiscuous Mode”, then set the value in the combobox to “Accept”

Press the “OK” button in the “Virtual Machine Port Group” dialog

Press the “Close” button in the “Virtual Switch” dialog

After rebooting, you can see the LSI status under “Configuration”, “Hardware”, “Health Status”. If that occasionally fails, you have to restart the “CIM Server” service under “Configuration”, “Software”, “Security Profile”, “Services”.

Add the HP specific drivers so you can see motherboard and temperature sensors

Monitoring the sensors (like temperature) of ESXi machines is tough: most standard monitoring stuff does not work as ESXi uses IPMI for monitoring.

I tried the below, but that didn’t work for an XW6600, as it does not do IPMI:

Do not monitor your physical sensors from within a VM. Tools like SpeedFan will lie. For instance, on an XW6600 it will say the processor temperature is over 100 degrees Celsius, whereas according to the Xeon E5420 specs the maximum temperature is less than 70 degrees Celsius.

SpeedFan, as an alternative, works just OK in the xw6400/xw8400 but does not read correctly in the xw6600/xw8600. Always run the latest BIOS, and there are some fan speed/temp info you can get in those later version workstation’s BIOS that is worth knowing about, including the RPMs for the front PCI fan if you have one installed and the chipset fan speed. HWMonitor will not get you those two.

Now at the ESX CLI, enter this command (change the path of the VIB file when needed) similar to How To Patch vSphere 5 ESXi Without Update Manager: “esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/HP-ESXi-downloads/vibsdepot.hp.com/hpq/apr2013/esxi-5x-bundles/hp-esxi5.0uX-bundle-1.4.5-3.zip”

Wait for a while (it can take a couple of minutes on slow systems) until you see output like this:Installation Result
Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required: true
VIBs Installed: Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_char-hpcru_5.0.3.09-1OEM.500.0.0.434156, Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_char-hpilo_500.9.0.0.9-1OEM.500.0.0.434156, Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_hp-ams_500.9.3.5-02.434156, Hewlett-Packard_bootbank_hp-smx-provider_500.03.02.10.4-434156
VIBs Removed:
VIBs Skipped:

If it fails, then retry the command like this by adding the “–no-sig-check“: “esxcli software vib install –no-sig-check-v /tmp/vmware-esx-provider-lsiprovider.vib” (for upgrading, use “esxcli software vib update –no-sig-check-v /tmp/vmware-esx-provider-lsiprovider.vib”)

Reboot the ESXi server, either from the ESX CLI (use “/sbin/reboot”) or from the vSphere Client

Disable maintenance mode. For instance entering this command from the ESX CLI: “esxcli system maintenanceMode set -e false -t 0”, or using the vSphere Client::

Add VMs from Data Stores

Adding VMs from data stores if you re-installed ESXi on a USB stick on a machine that has a RAID datastore. (funny that the machine got a new MAC and DNS IP address even though the network cable stayed in the same machine. The MAC Vendor ID was still 00:1F:29 – HP)

Start vSphere Client

Login to your ESXi server

In the tree view on the far left, select your ESXi server

Go to the “Summary” tab

Under “Storage”, click on the disk icon of the “Datastore” you want to add VMs from

Install it on a machine that is in the same network as your ESXi server (that’s the easiest way to connect); it can even be a VM on the ESXi server itself.

On that machine, make sure your ESXi host can be resolved both by IP-address and hostname. This means that I had to change the \WINDOWS\system32\drives\etc\hosts. file to contain an entry like this: 192.168.171.153 esxi51-C.asus.rt-n66u And don’t forget (if you already installed the LSI MSM), to restart the MSMFramework service: net stop MSMFramework net start MSMFramework

Run the SETUP.EXE from the unpacked files

Set LDAP to NO if you don’t have LDAP (which is usually the default)

Run MSM

Click the “Configure Host…” button

Select the radio button “Display all the ESXi-CIMOM servers in the network of the local server” or “Display all the systems in the network of the local server”

Press the “OK” button

Choose “Yes” in the dialog “Do you want to apply the display changes now?”

If you don’t (found out the hard way), there is no way to disable this from MSM any more (I was able to disable it from the LSI WebBIOS – which is a fancy name for the BIOS supporting mouse based operations).

Note that if you get a LSI MegaRaid warning: Patrol Read cant be started, then you most likely have overlapping schedules for the Patrol Read and Check Consistency. Which means you cannot run them both continuously at the same time (the easiest thing to setup), and have to plan for real.

Make a backup of your bootable USB stick, then test the restore

(And make sure you have a couple of the same sticks so if one of them fails, you have some left to restore on). I’m assuming all of your sticks are the same size, as that is the most practical way. I’m running from 1 GB sticks which is more than large enough.

Backup/restore on *nix or Mac OS X can be done through dd. It gets you a binary image of the USB stick.

all the vSwitch / VM Kernel / VM Port Group configuration (you get a default vSwitch0 with the default VM Kernel and VM Port Group, so if you have named them differently al your VMs don’t have connected NICs).